A Fun Way To Spend An Evening

Last night, Rick Beato popped up with an interview, here of Derek Trucks, which I found to be a very fine way to spend an hour.

A couple of highlights for me. First was Derek's discussion of why he and Susan are releasing their albums currently: One a month, basically, and with a few other twists, I'm not sure so I'll need to check out but I think that there's at least a small window where the album is streamed live, whole, and free? Either way, what I found fascinating was that Derek's reasoning here is entirely artist. There's no "strategy" here, other than the only one that ever matters, i.e. how do I reach the audience.

The other part I found fascinating was Derek's discussion of how he developed his "ear", his listening and vocabulary. Good stuff.

Rick's got some other very, very good interviews as well. One I'd recommend is one that Rick mentions in the Derek Trucks video, it's an interview of Ron Carter, bassist.

But the interview by Rick that I keep thinking about, and fair warning this one runs close to 2 hours, is of Pat Metheny. There's just so much here, I think a lot about what Pat says about the work involved in building an audience. But I also picked up on something about how Pat talks about his music, and also it's something that I then noticed about Ron and Derek's talks: you'll listen a lot and never hear any of them describe what they play in terms of "genre".

Now, I promise you that does not mean they don't know or care that they're playing a jazz standard, or a rock tune, or samba or whatever. I just suspect that genre just isn't something they put any real time or worry thinking about any more: just whether the tune they're writing or playing or recording works. Just the tune, that's all.